Violence aspires to poetry and vice versa in "Death in Granada," an American/Spanish production that sheds a fleeting but eerie light on one of Spain's greatest poets: Federico Garcia Lorca.

If you're not familiar with the name and his work, this is a chance to sample aspects of both. Lorca was considered a genius, admired by the likes of Luis Bun~uel and Salvadore Dali. He was incredibly handsome, a dandy, a liberal and a homosexual. A man whose brief life ended in 1936, Lorca was the closest approximation to Spain's first rock star. Fifteen-year-olds recited his poems to one another, thronged the theaters to see his plays, copied his suits. Women did their best to seduce him, men were seduced within five minutes of introductions. In short, Lorca was everything that the Franco regime detested. He was executed outside his home city of Granada, at the age of 38.

What exactly happened that fatal night and on whose orders? Why did Lorca choose to return to Granada just when the military had seized power? Such are the questions that had always baffled Lorca fans. As for director Marcos Zurinaga ("La Gran Fiesta"), those same questions had been a 30-year obsession. But he's not as interested in the answers as the inevitable and unavoidable sequence of events that led to Lorca's death. By tracing and retracing this story of a death foretold, Zurinaga enforces a dizzying sense of helplessness onto the viewer -- nothing can be done, Lorca is marked for murder and all one can do (as many of the characters in the movie) is wring one's hands in fascinated anguish. The terrible rush toward his final hour is re-enacted side by side with scenes from a corrida, and it's clear that for Zurinaga, this is exactly what Lorca's death means to him.